Post-digital Publishing Workshop: Home Library

Sat 02.02.

Sat 02.02.

Format:

Festival formatWorkshop

Festival threadPaper

Location:

other locations

Location: HKW Lower Foyer

Either you are a bookworm (collector), a non-stop downloader of pdfs or you have your own paperspace library. Maybe one day you will realize everyone else has a library of some sort and that among them, there are people with your same interests, who have great books you have never read or even seen before. So if you are either into borrowing tomes or creating shared folders, creating your shared Home Library can improve your reading life a lot. This workshop invites you to learn how to quickly digitize books and share them with whomever you want all over the world. Afterwards, you will look at your (virtual/physical) shelves like never before.

The event includes the presentation Cyber Libraries by Nenad Romić (aka Marcell Mars):

» In the catalog of History the Public Library is listed in the category of phenomena that we humans are most proud of. Along with the free public education, public health care, scientific method, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Wikipedia, Free Software... « (Marcell Mars)

It’s one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they go extinct. A place where all people can get access to all knowledge that can be collected seemed for a long time a dream beyond reach — dependent on the limited resources of rich patrons or unstable budgets of (welfare) states.

Internet, however, as in many other instances, has overturned what we take as given and as possible. The dream of all people getting access to all knowledge suddenly came within our reach. It seemed just an issue of interpreting when the trajectory curves of global personal computer distribution and internet access penetration would finally make universal access to knowledge a reality. However, the actual trajectory of development of public libraries in the age of internet are pointing in the opposite direction – that the phenomena we people are most proud of are being undercut and can easily go extinct.